Andrew Barnes

What if your Bitcoin node had an AI SRE on call 24/7? Not a chatbot that answers "what is Bitcoin?" -- an actual site reliability engineer that detects fee spikes at 3am, investigates mempool floods, diagnoses root causes, and tells you exactly what to do. One that follows the same incident response protocol your best on-call engineer follows, except it never sleeps and never forgets a runbook. That's what I built for the MCP & AI Agents Hackathon. Here's how.

Most open source contributions exist in isolation. You fix a bug here, add a feature there. But occasionally you get the chance to contribute across an entire ecosystem in a way where each PR reinforces the others. That's what happened when I spent a weekend contributing to three projects in the MCP agent infrastructure stack -- and in the process, made Bitcoin a first-class citizen across all of them.

A beginner's guide to MCP, agentgateway, and bitcoin-mcp I wanted to build an AI agent that could answer questions about Bitcoin. Not from a static FAQ -- I mean real-time data. Current block height. Mempool congestion. Fee estimates. Mining stats. I figured this would take days of API wrangling, authentication headaches, and custom plumbing. It took 10 minutes. Here's what I learned. The Problem AI models are smart, but they're stuck in the past.